


a litany of lost things

by escherzo



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Pre-Canon, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-15
Updated: 2012-11-15
Packaged: 2017-11-18 16:55:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/563285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/escherzo/pseuds/escherzo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone has to be the brave one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a litany of lost things

He is seventeen years old, standing naked face to face with his brother. The sunlight is dying. Dust cakes onto his toes, his ankles, skids of brown on the smudge-gray boards proof of where he and Dean have been. Dean breathes out, shallow and ragged, and the hairs prick up on the backs of Sam’s arms; he watches the way the light catches the thin blond strands. Isn’t ready to look his brother in the eye. Not yet.

Dean’s body is stretched out before him, miles of freckled, tanned skin broken up by the raised white gashes of scars. It makes Sam’s mouth water, just to look, and he aches deep in his bones, wanting. The sickness is in every part of him. In Dean, too, and maybe that makes it better. Maybe that makes it worse. He clenches a fist, releases, sucks in a deep breath that turns bitter and stale in his lungs. Someone has to be the brave one. Dean would wait forever, if Sam asked, but forever doesn’t match the letter folded into three pairs of shirts at the bottom of his bag. Forever isn’t leaving for California in three months.

Sam kisses his brother before he can hesitate again. Dean’s breath puffs out startled against his lips, caught off-guard for a fraction of a second, before he reaches out, curls a hand around the back of Sam’s neck, pulls him in closer, thumb digging into the side of Sam’s neck just enough for that bright spot of pain to light him up. Dean knows his body better than he does, which shouldn’t be a surprise. Dean’s broad, tough hands lay down the map-markers for the both of them, make Sam feel more at home in his skin than he has for years, since the first growing pains began to knife through him, and in this instant Sam knows Dean is his touchstone, his security, the axis upon which his world revolves, and even if he is leaving in three months, even if he goes, leaving the life is not leaving Dean, they would have to tear his heart out for him to leave Dean, and time snaps forward—

> He is thirty years old and standing alone, shaken, lost, black ooze on the walls and no Dean,  _no Dean,_ and his world narrows once again to that old, aching part of him that knows nothing but  _I will get him back_
> 
> maybe it’s a Tuesday.

—and then Dean tugs him forward, skin-to-skin, and the rest of the world slips away.  

**Author's Note:**

> Loosely based off a scene from Do Começo ao Fim and originally posted to tumblr May of 2012.


End file.
